Is a hen's egg alive?

I just don't understand the mentality of a person who won't eat meat and products thereof. Most of those animals are "mass produced" to feed us humans. It's not like we are extinguishing a species just to survive. Mother nature provided all living creatures with the teeth and digestive systems to handle certain diets. You don't see the animals arguing about what they should and should not eat! Humans are built to eat almost everything the earth provides which gives us choices in our diets. But that choice is personal not something to stand on a soapbox about! The animal activists need to be more concerned about the living conditions of the "mass produced" meats then whether to eat them or not.

Mother nature provided all living creatures with the teeth and digestive systems to handle certain diets. You don't see the animals arguing about what they should and should not eat! Humans are built to eat almost everything the earth provides which gives us choices in our diets.

Not that I am arguing for vegetarianism, but just because we can do something and/or are equipped to do it, doesn't mean we should do it.

But that choice is personal not something to stand on a soapbox about!

And posting a discussion on a blog about it isn't soapboxing because???

The animal activists need to be more concerned about the living conditions of the "mass produced" meats then whether to eat them or not.

While I personally agree with this, it IS a matter of opinion and I'm not sure telling someone what they should be worried about right after declaring it a "personal choice" is a terribly sensible statement.

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ANYWAY, is a hen's egg alive? I'm sure at some point it is, but I think the more important question is: is a hen's egg a separate organism from the parent if they are not fertilized? I'd say no.

Yeah, as long as they make the process as humane as possible, I'm fine with it. I'm vegetarian because I choose to be. I was never really all that wild about meat in the first place. For me, morals don't enter into it.

It is a fact that the complexity of human brain would be impossible to get without the aminoacids of animal proteins. So this people would be eating roots in the woods if they ancestors were not eating meat, fish, etc.

Humans do not digest dairy products well (I'm a nurse), so u're statement of humans being built to eat almost anything is incorrect..perhaps googling the next time may help your inquiries.

Can you elucidate, Alayana? It's true that not all humans can tolerate cow's milk (Asian people, IIRC) for example, we gained that "advantage" when we started farming a few millenia back. However, just because we don't digest something well is actually meaningless. We can't absorb much vit. C or create it ourselves, but we still require it to survive (being a limey myself, I know this only too well).

The veggie argument seems to stem from the "yuk" factor more than anything else and it's because (as you rightly observe) there are any number of emotive videos and treatises from people on both sides of the argument.

I won't question your medical knowledge, but as a species we are omnivorous hunter gatherers who continue to evolve (albeit biased by technology). I eat what I can in order to survive. Period. If that's meat, then so be it; if it's fruit and veg, that's fine too. My choices are based on price and availability - the only thing I need to avoid is excess sodium as my damaged kidneys can no longer process it as they once did.

This alludes to the false dichotomy (which I refer to as the Jublinsky Paradox) where emotions take over; sometimes even overtaking common sense. I can see this surfacing in this very argument in fact.

The other fact is that slaughterhouses and factory farming processes have evolved to fit a market which we created in just the same way that life evolves: driven by the same uncaring pressure. Sometimes we just have to realise that for our own sanity.

Incidentally, in prehistoric times, hens (like all birds) would only lay a single clutch of eggs - these egg producing machines we have today were selectively bred by man!

I don't eat mammals or processed foods myself. The first thing you hear in a small group of people when 2 or more get on vegetarianism is "My arthritis is gone.", "The bloating is gone.", "I lost 40 pounds" (that one is me) always the positive effects. It isn't that meat caused the problem, but when people become more aware of what they are eating and how it affects the way they feel, they improve their lives and some people want to help others and so they do the soap box thing. I say keep eating the doughnuts, chips, any thing with sugar in it, and other non-nutritious factory made foods everyone. It keeps down the price of real food.

I totally forgot to mention. When I was taking biochemistry in probably 84, the scientific world did NOT know that plants have all the amino acids you need. I think today it is only one of the the B vitamins they say you don't get from plants but like proteins maybe the just haven't found it in plants yet.